Tech sucks, and why I have this website

Ángel Umana

Disclaimer: this is 100% a rant in the moment and not a well-thought out thinkpiece. It's not all negative there's something nice at the end.

Over the past year I've completely flipped how I engage with technology:

  • Ditched my smartphone for a dumb phone (nokia 2780)
  • Deleted my instagram and linkedin
  • Cancelled my netflix and spotify subscriptions and instead started buying DVD's, CD's, and blu rays.
  • Started calling taxis instead of ubers and booking hotels instead of airbnbs
  • Converted angelumana.com from an online resume to a personal blog
  • Swapped gmail for proton mail
  • Deleted my github and started self-hosting my own forgejo for hosting my code
  • Exported all my google drive files/google photos and wiped all the data I had on there
  • Sold my ps5
  • Started using freetube instead of youtube directly, plus nebula

Probably a few other things I don't realize. But why do all this? Because tech sucks. It sucks ass.

Once upon a time tech companies had a genuine interest in solving real problems for people. They offered a useful service, people enjoyed it, everyone was happy. Now through the mechanisms of publically traded companies and class A shares, surveillance capitalism, enshittification, and psyops, these once useful services are now slopware that do more harm than good.

Social media feeds keep us hooked on dopamine, divide us into factions, and transform deep, intimate social lives into a loosely connect parasocial web. Dating and hanging out is turned into a carrot-and-stick online game where human connection is a commodity. Middlemen like airbnb, uber, and doordash have drained money out of consumers' and service providers' pockets while providing worse service compared to traditional counterparts (hotels and taxis). The supermarket down the street is now price gouging you based on your digital footprint. Hordes of data is being harvested to train AI models to impersonate us better and erase the line between reality and fantasy; this is the interstice comforting people who have found themselves lonely in a digital society that has forced them to be lonely. Gambling has exploded into the mainstream and the same psychology that ruins lives in the casino is now being exploited in video games to train little Timmy to be a gambler. Once his sense of delayed gratification has been wiped and he continues to have no understanding of probability and statistics, fintech will put him into financial ruin easier than ever before with the likes of klarna and affirm. Crypto stays not beating the ponzi scheme allegations when there's a new rug pull happening left and right.

All the meanwhile, tech companies continue to not give a fuck about the livelihood of people, whether its their own customers and employees, innocent bystanders who have tech forced on them (flock etc.), or victims of humanitarian crises abroad, in the name of wealth and political clout.

Degeneracy aside, software from a technical perspective just sucks ass these days. Shit's slow, bloated, overly complicated, and randomly doesn't work. React and its consequences.

Those are most of the reasons I've changed a lot of my tech habits and activities.

And despite all of that, I am still optimistic for the future. Every day, more and more people are acknowledging the dumpster fire we're in and they're done. Accounts are getting deleted, phones are being replaced with dumb(er) phones, windows users are migrating to linux (!!), tech companies are being boycotted.

This is the opportunity that Agency Economy and I are seizing. We're going to get the pendulum swinging the other way and rip it off its hook. Now, more than ever, I am realizing that my talents in tech are best spent not developing innovative tech, but simply guiding people in the direction where technology can serve them, not the other way around.

That's why I have my website the way it is. angelumana.com used to basically be an online resume. But I want to show people what you can do with your own website. I go on here and I can yap into the abyss, post neat little pics, and update my status. I use tools that are simple to use so that my workflows can be reproduced by anyone. Initially I was using hugo for this website but it was way too involved so that's why I'm using Publii now.

Hopefully as you go through my website, you can feel inspired to make a leap, any leap. Maybe it's deleting your instagram. Maybe it's ditching netflix. Maybe it's starting your own website! Whatever it is, if you're curious about making a leap, please feel free to reach out to me. A better world is inevitable.